Automated synthesis and diagnostic processes has met increasing interest in the last decades. In view of the need for standardised processes yielding product and results of uniform quality, a number of useful systems and methods for synthesis and diagnostic processes have been developed. A wide range of systems are commercially available, especially in the field of peptide and oligonucleotide synthesis where standardised synthetic steps can be described in great detail. In peptide and oligonucleotide synthesis standard protocols have been developed so that synthesis thereof can be effected in an automated manner.
A field of great interest is the field of development of novel organic compounds, e.g. novel drug candidates. Some of the major obstacles for an organic chemist today are the time consumed, the complexity, and the search for efficient routes in organic synthesis. As an example, the average performance some ten years ago was around 25–50 complete substances per chemist a year in the pharmaceutical industry, resulting in an equal amount of new chemical entities as potential new drug candidates. Today the figure is close to 100's per year and will soon be expected to be in the region of 1000's per year per day.
Thus, the challenges for the pharmaceutical industry and the organic chemist include identification of ways of reducing time in the drug development, identification of ways of creating chemical diversity, development of new synthesis routes and reintroduction of old “impossible” synthetic routes. Also, it is a constant challenge to reach classes of totally new chemical entities.
Microwaves assisted chemistry offers a way of providing solutions to at least some of the above problems, namely by speeding up the reaction time with orders of magnitude, improving the yield of chemical reactions, offering higher purity of the resulting product due to rapid heating and thereby reducing impurities from side reactions, and making reactions which were not considered feasible with conventional thermal heating possible.
However, it has often been considered difficult to select optimal conditions for an organic transformation independent if it is based on conventional methods or the use of microwave dielectric heating in that suitable reaction conditions often are found within a very narrow “window”. In particular, it is usually considered quite difficult to determine the most suitable combination of process parameters, e.g. applied power, time, solvent, etc.
Although the organic chemist has knowledge about a wide variety of chemical reaction types, he will, if possible, tend to select familiar reaction types even when totally new chemical entities are to be synthesised. Thus, for the organic chemist, it would be desirable if he could gain access to “novel” reaction types associated with reagents unfamiliar to him in a easy manner. Preferably, the automated synthesis of novel drug candidates and other complex chemical entities should not be limited to “chemistries” developed by the organic chemist operating the system.
There is thus a need for a flexible set-up where the organic chemist can explore a number of reactions without the need for detailed literature studies. This will make it possible for the organic chemist to perform a number of reactions (R reactions) in order to become familiarised with the reaction type. This appears to be especially relevant in the cases where the organic chemist is utilising microwave assisted chemical reactions.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,800,784 describes a chemical treatment cassette for enabling the performance of various complex chemistries with minimal human intervention. It is described that the cassette includes a machine readable code set for identifying the exact chemical treatment protocols required for the samples in the cassette. Thus, the machine readable code set substitutes the manual instructions normally provided to a system so that the cassettes can be processed independent of human intervention. However, in U.S. Pat. No. 5,800,784, the machine readable code set and thereby the exact chemical treatment protocols should still be defined and selected by the user prior to the processing of the samples.